3 hours ago
3
Trombone concertos don’t come around every day. The last time this Cinderella of the brass section had a major moment in the spotlight was in 2022, when the Proms hosted their first solo trombonist in almost 20 years. Before that, you have to go back to 2008 for headlines – when a dazzling 12-year-old broke records as the youngest ever winner of BBC Young Musician. The trombone player in each case? Peter Moore.
Now with a decade-long stint at the London Symphony Orchestra under his belt, Belfast-born Moore is one of the great champions of his instrument, whose growing concerto repertoire has a lot to do with his persuasive advocacy. He had an intriguing platform in Dai Fujikura’s Vast Ocean II (2023) – a reworking of the composer’s 2005 trombone concerto, given its UK premiere here by Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
Stanisław Lem’s sci-fi novel Solaris provides the starting point: Fujikura’s orchestra the teeming, sentient, otherworldly ocean, the trombone a human adventurer. “He’s George Clooney,” Fujikura joked of Moore in the pre-concert talk. The musical effect, though, is less Hollywood and more Tarkovsky – a pointillist canvas of glinting sounds and textures that only rarely coalesce into anything conventionally developmental, preferring to circle and echo, dissolve and re-form. Moore made his instrument sing, finding shifting colours in the score’s insistent, repeated notes, coaxing slides into vocal sighs and howls while Yamada conjured a rich, elusive backdrop. Does it all add up to more than a sequence of gorgeous sonic episodes? I’m not sure. But Fujikura is, after all, the master of the musical unanswered question.
We swapped other worlds for more familiar territory after the interval, and the earthly – and earthy – landscapes of Mahler’s Symphony No 1. It’s a work that suits Yamada’s heart-on-sleeve, instinctive musicianship, a symphony painted in the broadest of strokes. The second movement’s lilting peasant-Ländler swayed with more than a whiff of schnapps in the deliciously woozy string portamenti, the finale whipped up thunderclaps of timpani before a blinding climax, brass on their feet, instruments triumphantly raised. Only in the third movement, with its sinister minor-key version of Frère Jacques – bells chiming not for matins but a funeral – did we miss something. There were grotesques here, hints of sleazy horror in the klezmer-esque theme, but not the bleak nullity that is the necessary counterweight to all the symphony’s overflowing life and optimism.
